MATRIX 286 / Amol K Patil: A Forest of Remembrance

January 18–April 20, 2025

Amol K Patil works across painting, sculpture, performance, and video and excavates the lived experiences of Mumbai’s working class. For his first solo exhibition in the United States, the artist presents a newly commissioned body of work that reconfigures the architecture of the city’s chawls into a space of collective memory and dynamic protest.

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Amol K Patil: Whispers of the Dust, 2024

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MATRIX 286 / Amol K Patil: A Forest of Remembrance

January 18–April 20, 2025

Amol K Patil (b. 1987, Mumbai, India) works across painting, sculpture, performance, and installation to bring the lived experiences of India’s urban working-class inhabitants into vibrant relief. In his multipart exploration of Mumbai’s chawls, residential structures built in the early 1900s to house mill workers and other migrant laborers, Patil seeks to capture the everyday humanity of those historically on the margins. Despite the poverty of their surroundings, the chawl residents have for over a century created lively communal spaces infused with the sounds, scents, and textures of their daily rhythms.

In recent years, government-backed plans to redevelop these sites have displaced thousands of families, underscoring how the urban poor remain at the mercy of larger structures of power. Drawing upon his own family’s history of dissent—his father was an avant-garde playwright who performed in grassroots theater productions and his grandfather wrote songs in the powada tradition of spoken word protest—Patil shines light on the social and political injustices these communities face and the dignity, creativity, and resourcefulness with which they continue to fight for their rights.

A Forest of Remembrance, Patil’s first solo museum exhibition in the United States, presents an installation of newly commissioned paintings and sculptures. The walls of the gallery have been coated in layers of blue and yellow hues, textured and weathered to mimic the layers of paint in the chawls. Within this mise-en-scène, small-scale paintings offer windows into intimate interiors, while the platforms that punctuate the space recall the makeshift stage sets on which his father and other theater activists often performed. The sculptures—modeled in clay and then cast in bronze—give shape to the people who have for generations occupied the chawls, their defiant hands and feet extending from their collective bodies in dynamic protest.

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MATRIX 286 / Amol K Patil: A Forest of Remembrance is curated by Victoria Sung, Phyllis C. Wattis Senior Curator, and Margot Norton, Chief Curator; with Tausif Noor, Curatorial Associate.

The exhibition is part of BAMPFA’s ongoing MATRIX series of contemporary art exhibitions. Founded in 1978, MATRIX provides artists with an experimental platform to make and show new work.

The MATRIX program is made possible by a generous endowment gift from Phyllis C. Wattis. Additional support for MATRIX 286 is provided by Project 88, Mumbai.

MATRIX 286 / Amol K Patil: A Forest of Remembrance

January 18–April 20, 2025

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Artist’s Talk and Conversation: Amol K Patil and Victoria Sung

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